1. Field
The present invention relates generally to communications, and more specifically, to rate-compatible error-correcting coding using Low Density Parity-Check (LDPC) codes.
2. Background
In communication systems that employ rate adaptation, for example, wherein the transmission data rate is adjusted according to conditions and demands of the system, there is a need to transmit data so as to flexibly and efficiently adapt the data rate to the current channel conditions. Typical error correcting designs, for example, select a fixed code, the code having a certain rate and correction capability. To add flexibility for handling different amounts of data having different error protection requirements, adjusting to time-varying channel conditions, as well as compensating for insufficiently known parameters, flexible channel encoding may be employed.
For flexible channel encoding, the data bits may be grouped into blocks of varying size, and these blocks may be encoded with different amounts of redundancy, resulting in codewords of different lengths. Instead of using several separate error correcting codes to encode the different groups of bits, it is desirable to use a single mother code that may accommodate several rates. This is referred to as rate-compatible coding. Using a single code instead of separate codes for each desired rate may significantly reduce the complexity of both encoding at the transmitter and decoding at the receiver, however, the reduced complexity is achieved at the expense of some performance degradation. One such method for rate-compatible coding involves Rate-Compatible Punctured Convolutional (RCPC) codes. This and other current methods offer limited performance or incur undesirable computational complexity at the decoder.
There is a need therefore, to provide high performance rate-compatible coding schemes that support rate adaptation while minimizing the complexity of the encoder and the decoder.